Thursday, December 16. 2010

Very cool proof of concept / festive geek-out project. Take advantage of the Lync 2010 SDK, Micro .NET Framework and some parts to make the holiday lights change color based on Communicator 2010 / Lync presence information.

Watch the video here and get the background information about the setup on the forum located here.

Thanks to @DrRez for posting this very cool use of technology on Twitter.

There are many Lync-specific fixes so if you are planning on deploying Lync and will have a coexistence period, I would install these on your OCS 2007 R2 server setup before installing Lync. This is only a personal opinion but it looks like it would avoid some known gotchas.

The phone edition reports 6907.222 instead of 6907.221 like the rest of the updated components. I suspect it was a last minute bug fix/issue check-in after the other builds.

Thank to Richard for pointing out there were new updates for Live Meeting and the Conferencing Add-in.

Sunday, November 21. 2010

Although it wasn't funny at the time, my original Verizon Novatel USB 720 adapter was stolen by raccoons that raided our chicken coop where the home wireless setup lived. They killed all the chickens but they also took the 3G modem because it had blinking lights.

That back story might seem extraneous but it relates to this blog entry. The replacement 3G adapter was a Novatel 760. The 720 never locked up. The 760 would about once a week or once a month depending on usage.

The telltale signs were a solid light on and even powering off the unit through the VZW software would not work. I eventually just got used to unplugging it and plugging it back in after a while. It effectively would go into a coma on any computer it was used on.

Recently, there were 2 firmware updates released inside of the VZW access software. You can grab the latest software and firmware update from here.

With the new firmware, I can no longer make the device lock up and it seems to have better receive sensitivity. Either way, I recommend anyone using this device to perform the firmware update.

Saturday, November 20. 2010

If you are migrating mailboxes from Groupwise to on-premise Exchange 2010 SP1, you will want to setup a throttling policy on Exchange 2010 SP1 that is almost identical to the typical throttling settings used for Blackberry and/or Cisco Unity.

I typically recommend not setting any of the throttling values to unlimited. This is a bit more restrictive than the suggestions made by the Blackberry and/or Cisco Unity settings.

The most important throttling value we need to increase for Quest's Groupwise Migrator is the RCAPercentTimeInAD. The telltale sign are throttling event logs on the Exchange server and see-saw network/cpu usage on the migration workstation. The Address Book service seems to receive quite a bit of traffic from the Groupwise migration tools due to user account look ups.

On most of my migrations, I ended up using a value of 200 for RCAPercentTimeInAD. I have yet to encounter a server that required value higher than 200.

Thankfully, you can apply this new policy on the user account that acts as the go-between Exchange and Groupwise. Typically, it is called something like GWMigrate.

Additionally, you can also apply this new policy on the migration workstation's computer account. Typically, it is called something like GWMigrateServer.

Using that server name and user name as an example, this is what you would execute with Powershell on the Exchange server:

Many organizations have OCS 2007 R2 servers installed and one lone OCS 2007 R1 CWA server installed, specifically for the Blackberry client support that relies on APIs that are only available on OCS 2007 R1's CWA server.

This typically isn't a problem until you are upgrading to Lync.

If you have all OCS 2007 R1 servers in your environment, you're fine.
If you have all OCS 2007 R2 servers in your environment, you're fine.

BlackBerry has promised an OCS 2007 R2 CWA compatible version for a few years now but I have yet to see it materialize.

The easiest workaround, which I haven't tried yet due to lack of time and lack of a lab environment with OCS 2007 R1 CWA, is to remove the R1 CWA server, install Lync, and then re-introduce the R1 CWA server into the environment. I'd be curious to hear if people have been able to do this or not.

The other noteworthy item, which is much like the limitation of newer Exchange versions, is to make sure to install OCS 2007 R1/OCS 2007 R2 servers into your environment before installing Lync, if you ever want or need to use OCS 2007 R1/R2 servers in your environment.

Wednesday, November 3. 2010

I say "new" because it is a completely different code base from the older PlaceWare Live Meeting client code. If you wondered where the "pw" from "pwconsole.exe" came from, it was originally from a company called PlaceWare.

If you want to host Lync online meetings and not have the users/attendees use the web based client, you can download the Admin installed version here or the User installed version here.

What is the difference between the two?

The user installed client lives in the user's profile since most organizations are moving away from users having administrative rights on the local PCs.
The admin installed client lives in the %ProgramFiles% (or %ProgramFiles(x86)% if on a 64-bit OS) like most older style programs

There is one other popular application that uses the same type of differentiation and installs into the local profile - Google Chrome.
It is good to see more applications adopt this trend since it makes LUA (Least User Access) / UAC easier to adopt.

Monday, November 1. 2010

Many times I am on the road with questionable Internet connectivity. Many times my EVDO 3G card is faster than the oversubscribed hotel internet access and I'll use that card in a pinch.

In those situations, I might want or need to log into Lync to Lync up with people.

Due to the limited bandwidth, I don't necessarily want people to try to do a video conference with me, but as long as my RSSI is -90 to -80 (3 "bars" to 4 "bars"), I can actually do a decent Communicator call or call thru the mediation server.

I have needed to do this in certain situations when I have a malfunctioning or dying cell phone. Combined with a Bluetooth headset, and the 3g card, I've been able to make calls I'd otherwise would need to find a pay phone. Pay phones are becoming as rare as a Sony Walkman.

With all that in mind, if you allow end users to set the location in their Communicator, you can advertise that you are on a bandwidth limited connection:

Not necessarily the original intent of that section of the Lync client, but it is an easy indicator to coworkers that you are on a bandwidth starved connection.

I personally can't wait until the LTE networks are deployed nationwide. With that, in theory, this 'workaround' for advertising a limited bandwidth connection goes away.

The official Cisco certified version of Exchange 2010 for use with Unity is 2010 RTM RU3, as of today (10-27-2010).
Exchange 2010 RTM RU4, Exchange 2010 SP1 and Exchange 2010 SP1 RU1 have all come out since Exchange 2010 RTM RU3.
Many enterprises have already upgraded to Exchange 2010 SP1 and SP1 RU1.
Cisco is working on getting Exchange 2010 SP1 certified but it hasn’t been yet with no ETA.

Updates on Cisco Unity support will most likely end up here. It contains the most up to date instructions on how to update the Unity servers to interop with Exchange 2010.

On a good note, a new version of the Exchange 2007/2010 MAPI CDO was posted on Microsoft's website here a few days ago, which seems to fix the issues noted here on Cisco's website and noted here on Microsoft's website.

Known gotchas with Exchange 2010 SP1:
By default, the Unity 7.0(2) ES train patches try to use old Exchange 2010 RTM Powershell commands to create the Unity mailboxes if you are trying to partner with the Exchange 2010 server in a brand new Unity install. The workaround is to partner with an Exchange 2003 server during this process or manually create the mailboxes before applying the Unity patch.

If the Unity service mailboxes already live in the Exchange 2003 environment, and/or Unity is already partnered with an Exchange 2003 server, it can modify the accounts it needs, assuming you’ve given those accounts the right permissions.

If they are using Unity 7.0(2) ES36 in a fail-over environment, you need a database fix-up utility from Cisco TAC to prevent failed fail-over of Unity servers, called CiscoUnity_7.02_Patch11e.exe. Telltale sign of the issue: 0x80040e37 - Failed to verify SQL Configuration Table

Friday, October 15. 2010

In the past I blogged about an issue that typically surfaced during an OCS 2007 R2 install on Server 2008 R1.

Due to a operating system deadlock condition, on some but not all servers, the server would stall at "Applying User Settings" until all services that would depend on http.sys or crypto time out. It was especially painful on OCS Front End servers because almost every OCS service would have to hang and timeout before a usable desktop would appear.

The good news is that you no longer have to use the workaround that changes service dependencies.

Trust me, it was an extremely annoying issue to debug when it first occurred at an on-site install.

The networking stack would not start up when this issue triggered, which meant using a remote management console or direct console access.

To be clear, it wasn't an OCS 2007 R2 issue, it was a Server 2008 R1 issue that could deadlock in certain scenarios. The most common scenario was OCS 2007 R2.

You can just apply the Server 2008 R1 hotfix from here and never worry about it again.